Childbirth again

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

In The Christian Future , Rosenstock-Huessy again makes some passing comments about childbirth. He is talking about the character of suburban life, its ethnic and economic uniformity, its placid and indifferent external peacefulness that hides, he claims, desperate inner conflicts. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the whole situation is summarized by the fact that the suburb excludes experience of death and resurrection. Sickness and death are “not allowed to happy visibly in a suburb. Even the word ‘death’ is almost taboo.” At the... Read more

American Confucius

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Rosenstock-Huessy offers this synopsis of the beliefs of Dewey’s pragmatic followers: 1. God is immanent in society. 2. “Hman speech is merely a tool, not an inspiration; a set of words, not a baptism by fire.” Dewey exhorts us to find a new set of words to formulate a new “moral ideal.” In a response reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor, Rosenstock-Huessy says, in effect, if it’s only a “set of words,” then to hell with it. (more…) Read more

Chiasm in 1 John 4

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

The first 6 verses of 1 John 4 are organized in a roughly chiastic pattern: A. Test spirits, v 1 B. Confession, vv 2-3 C. From God/the world, vv 3b-4a D. We overcome them, v 4b C’. From God/from world, vv 5-6a B’. Hearing (AKOUO), v 6b A’. Spirits, v 6c A couple of notes on this structure. (more…) Read more

On research grants

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

A friend, Jim Rogers of Texas A&M, sent along a rejoinder to my post summarizing Rosenstock-Huessy’s views on grant-supported research. He points out that grant support in science and social science is not intended to provide revolutionary break-throughs, but to support the empirical research necessary to confirm or deny theory-driven hypotheses. Non-empirical theorists seek grants to gain time for developing and writing up their theories. He suggests an analogy with Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutions: Grants support, and know they... Read more

Sermon outline, First Sunday After Epiphany

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION As Jesus predicted, false prophets arose in the first century, misleading many believers (Matthew 24:24; 1 John 4:1). Christians have to be on guard; not everyone who claims to speak for God does speak for God. But how can we tell? THE TEXT “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that... Read more

Eucharistic meditation, First Sunday After Christmas

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Luke 22:18: Jesus said, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes. When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, He was looking forward to a future kingdom and a future feast. That is a central theme of this meal: It is a foretaste, a preview, an early course in the feast of the kingdom, the marriage supper of the lamb. This meal, like the gospel itself, calls us to a... Read more

Exhortation, Sunday After Christmas

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

As we’ll see in our sermon this morning, time is a good creation of God, and a good gift to us. Since that’s true, we are stewards, not owners, of our time. As stewards, we will have to give an account of how we use the time that God gives. As you enter 2007, conduct an audit. Are you being a good steward of this gift? How have you been spending the time God gives? How are you using it?... Read more

Jihad

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Despite the evidence of the past half-decade (longer, actually), many Muslims still insist on portraying Islam as fundamentally peaceful, tolerant of non-Muslims, and claim the holy-war interpretation of jihad as an aberration of a few fanatics. Perhaps not surprisingly, these apologists are found not only in Arab and Iranian mosques but in American univerities. Andrew G Bostom, a professor of medicine in Rhode Island, massively destroys these apologies in The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of... Read more

History of texts

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

One way to characterize the modern innovation in biblical interpretation is that it changes the Bible from a history of salvation into a history of documents. The Bible does not give access to history or the acts of God; it only gives us access to itself – the Bible as evidence of the formation of the Bible. Anyone who has suffered through a numbing self-referential OT seminar at SBL knows how true this is. Gerard Bruns suggestively comments that the... Read more

Oxford Companion

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

The new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature , edited by novelist Margaret Drabble, is a superb, entirely updated reference work. The range is astonishing: As one would expect, it includes biographical entries for British poets and novelists from the earliest times to yesterday, but also reviews the work of philosophers, historians, journalists, scientists, scholars, artists and others who influenced British literature. And the biographical entries are not limited to Britain – there’s one on Pynchon, another on... Read more